Talk by Caroline Féry, Monday 6th, 4-6 pm

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are very happy to announce a talk in the meeting of the Syntax-semantics colloquium of IEAS, which will take place on Monday, May 6, 4 – 6 pm in IG 3.201. Caroline Féry will present „A puzzle for verum focus“. Abstract: If verum focus is to be analyzed as a Roothian kind of focus, eliciting a set of alternatives and following the regular rules of sentence accent assignment (Höhle 1992, Goodhue 2018), a dialogue like the following one is problematic since the only new element in Sam’s sentence is the negation. Micah: Where is everyone else? Sam: There is noone else However, the negation is not accented, instead the verb is accented (see Richter 1993 for a syntactic account of the unstressed status of the negation). In my talk, I will show that verum focus has a variety of additional interpretations (see Romero & Han 2004, Gutzmann & Castroviejo 2011, Lohnstein 2016, Samko 2017 among others) and I will introduce an additional one: counter-assertive vs....
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Talk by Markus Werning (Ruhr University Bochum), Thursday 2nd, 4-6 pm

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Semantic Colloquium, which will take place on Thursday, May 2, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Markus Werning (Ruhr University Bochum) will present „Bayesian Pragmatics and the Contextual Modulation of Word Meanings in Online Comprehension: A Quantitative Model of EEG and Cloze data“. Abstract: We contrast three quantitative models to explain the contextual modulations of word meanings and how they affect the probabilistic predictions on the completion of a discourse. How words are semantically understood by a listener can not only be studied from the point of view of compositionality, i.e., by asking what they contribute to the truth-conditions the listener recognizes the speaker to express when the latter has uttered a sentence. Word meanings can also be studied by looking at their dynamic effects, i.e., asking in which way they influence the listener's predictions about the truth-conditions the speaker is going to express when completing the sentence. The Semantic Similarity...
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Talk by Ora Matushansky, Thursday 25th, 4-6 pm

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are very happy to announce the first talk in the Semantic Colloquium, which will take place on Thursday, April 25, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Ora Matushansky (Paris/Utrecht) will present „Doing without“. Abstract: Caritive PPs (without X) are characterized by their ability to appear without an article in Romance and Germanic, raising the question of the semantic type of their complement, which is likely to be kind-denoting. In addition, caritive PPs systematically introduce the presupposition that the absent entity should have been present at some level of reality. Whereas the latter fact can be handled by assuming that the complement of without is relational, this hypothesis runs into problems given the kind-denotation hypothesized to deal with the lack of the article. I will discuss a way of resolving this conflict and the theories advanced to deal with similar issues.   You are cordially invited!...
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Talk by Natalie Boll-Avetisyan, Wednesday 17th, 4-6 pm

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are very happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium, which will take place on Wednesday, April 17, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Natalie Boll-Avetisyan (Universität Potsdam) will present „Prosody for speech processing: Determinants of variability and stability“. Abstract: Prosody provides important cues for speech segmentation and lexical access, and it is a well-established finding that listeners make use of prosodic information during speech processing (Cutler, Dahan, & Donselaar, 1997). However, prosody in the speech signal is variable: First, it is subject to cross-linguistic variation. Moreover, it is acoustically highly variable, both within and between speakers. This raises the question of how listeners deal with this variability in language acquisition and speech perception. Are there determinants of stability in prosody perception? In this talk, I will present a series of prosody perception experiments we have carried out with different populations (infants and adults, mono- and bilinguals, with or without (a risk for) developmental dyslexia) to explore these questions. Results...
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